USDA Nutrient Database Web Service

The US Department of Agriculture provides a fairly comprehensive database of foods and their nutritional information. However, I think they don’t really want anyone to use it, as it’s only available as separate US-ASCII text files or, even worse, an MS-Access database.

Some time ago I found myself needing this data in a web app, so I built the USDA Nutrient Database gem. It’s very simple, and basically just downloads and imports the text files into your application database.

The Web Service

Recently Corey Martin wrote a blog post about using my gem along with some others to build smarter nutrition labels for CookSmarts. In it he mentions them building their own server just for serving nutrient information, which eventually inspired me to build this service. It provides all of the same data, but additionally adds full text search, pagination, caching, and soon weight conversions. I’ll be keeping the data up to date and will be providing product support. Feature requests may be sent through UserVoice. Maybe I’ll throw an object mapper gem together in the coming months, to allow people to deal with ruby instead of JSON. Anyway, you can find the USDA Nutrient Service here… Enjoy

TL;DR

I built a web service that you can use to query the USDA National Nutrient Database. You can find the docs at http://docs.usdanutrientservice.apiary.io/. It provides querying, full text searching, pagination, caching, and is also kept up to date with the latest data.

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I don't have a lot of time at the moment, but I'm always interested to hear about new projects. I'm particularly interested in EmberJS/Elixir projects and refactoring Rails monoliths. Drop me a line at hello [at] mattbeedle [dot] name or using my contact form http://www.mattbeedle.name/#page-contact.

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